It would very useful to learn how to flip a coin (into the air), but not have it actually flip (end-over-end) as per the article. They implied that if the coin is oscillating or wobbling, people would not notice that it's not actually flipping. This could win me a lot of root beers!
It actually isn't all that hard to teach yourself to flip a coin, catch it after the right number of turns, slap it onto your wrist and make it come out however you like. I achieved about 80% success when I practiced this. I'm not exactly the most adept at leger-de-main: I have little doubt somebody could get to the high 90% with practice.
You could probably even get good enough to allow somebody to call it in the air.
Recently, I completed reading Blondie24 -- Playing at the Edge of AI, an interesting book by David Fogel on his attempt to use evolutionary computation to evolve a high quality checker playing program. He tested his program by playing online against other checker players on The Zone, an online gaming network.
Early on, he discovered that his rather pedestrian nickname attracted few opponents, so he changed his online nick to be Obi_WanTheJedi, which seemed to attract a great deal more competition. As his program was revised and became stronger, he noticed that opponents would often become rude and angry as they fell behind, and would stall hoping he would drop out, or just disconnect, often after swearing like a sailor. Such drop outs made evaluating the games more difficult, so they tried a different strategy. This seemed worst among intermediate players: the better players were often much better sports.
They developed a cover story for Blondie24, a 24 year old female mathematics major. She was also single, attractive, and looking for a boyfriend.
They reported that they were on the receiving end of crude remarks and suggestions in about 1 in 3 games. Interestingly enough, the better players were reported to be uniformly polite, complimenting "her" on her excellent play at so
young an age.
It seems rather obvious to me that women and men should be competing in the same competitions in this arena. The mere fact that fewer women play should not be a deterrent, nor do I think the prospect of easier money for women competitors merely by virtue of their being fewer female competitors is a good precedent to set. But perhaps all players should review their own behavior, and try to maintain a degree of fun and sportsmanship.
Perhaps you'd like to point out just where this functioning anti-missile technology has been deployed? You think that after twenty years of development and billions of dollars, you would have something to show for it, wouldn't you?
I implemented an Enigma-cracking program when I was trying to crack the codes in Simon Singh's Cipher Challenge presented in The Code Book. It was a great deal of fun, and required just the right mix of learning, hacking and debugging to accomplish. Eventually I cracked 7 out of 10 of the ciphers (all the ones I expected to be within reasonable grasp).
The first difficulty was finding a sufficiently detailed description of the Enigma machine itself, so that I could write a simulator. Eventually I found a fairly good description of the machine, and some cleartext/ciphertext pairs to try it against. Initially there was a minor problem, which I eventually submitted as a plea to a newsgroup and received a quick response from an
eGroup member as to the bug. Voila! A working
simulator.
I took advice from Jim Gillogly and his
cipher text only break of the Enigma machine. I suspected the final text would be German, so I built a table of trigraph frequencies from Goethe's Faust, which I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I then coded up a simple hill climbing algorithm which proceeded by
Scanning all possible rotor orders (six of them) and all possible rotor positions (26^3), looking for the text with the trigraph score, and then
refining that by hillclimbing by redoing the plugboard.
It worked the very first time: out popped the flawless decrypt in less than three minutes on
my old 133Mhz P5.
Singh's challenge was signficantly aided by the fact that his ciphertext was quite a bit longer
than the recommended message length that was
actually used in the War. My experience in trying
to crack shorter messages was that the statistics
used to guide the search were often unreliable,
and the likelihood of getting a successful automatic decrypt were quite a bit lower.
I'm curious to know if this is just an extension of Ronald Reagan's plans of the space missile defense systems (which at the time people scoffed at).
People scoffed at them because they were stupid. The idea of a comprehensive anti-ballistic missile system was stupid, and continues to be stupid. SDI was conceived for one purpose and one purpose only: as a boondoggle for defense contractors.
If I had to pick which space program to fund, I would choose planning for war in space before I would put a man on Mars. Mars is a big dead rock. It may have held life at some point, maybe not. We can put a robot up there today to help take a peek, 10 years from now, they'll probably be shipping samples back to earth. Having someone bypass our ground/shore weapons and detection systems, by shooting at us from outer space, seems to be a lot more likely than finding someone to talk to on Mars.
This gets Insightful?
Just who is going to be out there attacking us from space? Just how do you expect that these hypothetical attackers can test their space systems without being observed by any of our intelligence satellites? Who has the money and the motivation to launch such a massive undertaking?
Due to the economics, the U.S. has a great deal more to fear in the way of small, disgruntled terrorists who may construct biological, chemical or radioactive bombs. All the space based defenses in the universe won't keep you safe from
those people.
The weaponisation of space is a very poor idea. The so called Outer Space treaty signed by the United States bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. This agreement was signed by the U.S., the U.S.S.R, and China, along with many other nations. While weapons of a more limited scope are not directly prohibited by this treaty, developing a significant capability to deliever weapons systems of a more conventional nature into space will undoubtably be viewed rather dimly by other nations, since it is clear that such technology and capacity could be quickly retargeted towards other uses.
Recent administrations have viewed these and other non-proliferation treaties as insignificant and not binding. It's a tragic failure of our foreign policy, and enormously short sighted.
Re:python & ruby are fine,but they lack {}'s a
on
Perl's Extreme Makeover
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's an idea: get over it. It isn't that big
of deal, and either choice is vastly more readable
than perl.
This was the same group that said SDI wouldn't work back in '83-'84.
SDI didn't work in the eighties, or the nineties, nor the oughts. It's a silly pipe dream designed to fill the pockets of defense contractors. It's like saying we can make an effective defense against gun crimes by making machines which shoot bullets aimed your way out of the air. It's vastly cheaper for them to make bullets than it is for you to build something that can shoot bullets, and it always will be.
The author's point seems to be that because Open Source software allows anyone to contribute code, that the chance for an "agent provocateur" to insert malicious code into a project is large, and that the use of such code by governments could result in significant security risks.
Let's forget for a moment that the author doesn't actually cite even a single instance of this actually occurring.
The real question is: is this any less likely in systems which are developed in the closed source/commercial world? Does the author believe that potential info-terrorists can't work to place themselves into companies where they might be able to achieve similar ends? It might be more difficult, but once achieved the chance of detection would seem to be significantly lower, since only a very select few get to view the source code in question, and they aren't necessarily motivated by security concerns (they are concerned with pushing their software out the door for sale).
Ask yourself this question: are companies like Microsoft more responsive to security bug alerts, or is Linux?
The author also writes:
So far, major Linux distributions such as Debian and others have been able to discover and remedy attacks on their core source-code servers. The distributions point to the fact that they discovered and openly discussed these breaches as evidence that their security measures work. Call me paranoid, but such attacks, however well handled, serve to raise the question of whether other such attacks have been more successful (in other words, undiscovered).
Again, a similar question should be asked: isn't this a similar problem for closed source/commercial development, where it might be in the best interest of the company to either ignore or cover up significant security breaches, and where the cause of such breaches are hidden
from the eyes of those qualified to perform security audits?
The author asks the question "Who is watching the watchers?". The answer is simple: everyone is. Or at least everyone can, which is perhaps the best that can be done.
Is there ever an argument against evolution that can withstand even the most cursory critical analysis? This one certainly doesn't.
Your "calculation" is a prime example of the GIGO principle. It utterly fails to capture any of the significant features of evolution. The first thing to realize is that individuals do not evolve: populations do. Without any mention of populations, your calculation is meaningless. Secondly, your calculation assumes that each of these mutations occur independently and simulateously. Mutations can be rare, but they are often passed to the descendants with a very high probability. This is also not reflected in
your mathematics.
Evolution may not be truth, but it is fact. Only perverse individuals would claim otherwise.
... Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first.
Or, perhaps not.
Computer science and programming aren't the same thing. Computer science is knowledge. Programming is a skill. They reinforce each other, but it is a mistake to confuse them as being the same thing.
Higher level languages hide irrelevant details from us. They are a good thing: they allow us to
concentrate on the task that we are trying to achieve. What parts of a machine are irrelevant? Most of them.
Don't believe me? Consider how many lines of code are in the Linux kernel, and compare the differences between say a PPC port of Linux and the X86 differences. Not very many differences compared to the raw number of lines, is it? That's because most of the machine differences are irrelevant.
Sure, you could clutter your mind with instruction timings, rules for cache invalidation or pipeline stalls. But it's almost certainly a waste of time, and it will get you no closer to understanding Computer Science.
As I discuss in Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else , it is extremely important that OSS projects choose a GPL-compatible license. You don't need to use the GPL - not even the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the developer of the GPL and its most avid proponent, claims that absolutely all software must be GPL-licensed. But choosing a license incompatible with the GPL is generally a bad idea if you're developing open source software.
Don't you think it is a bit silly to presume that you know better than the author of a work what is in his best interest or the best interest of users of his code? Your argument is an incredibly self serving one: you obviously want more code for GNU related projects. It is entirely possible for rational people to choose alternative open source licenses that do not coincide with that goal.
Get over it. Yes, SCO is a company that appears
to be litigating themselves into profitability, at least until they can manage a stock dump. Yes, they are lobbying Congress with lies about the GPL and the open source movement.
But this doesn't justify a lynch mob. What you are
doing is illegal.
If that doesn't convince you, think of the millions of people whose days are inconvenienceda and/or wrecked. Don't you think that their misery far exceeds any temporary hurt you could deal to SCO? It's not like they need to have a whole lot of internet connectivity to litigate
their cases. If anything, being DOS'ed helps
them make their point.
First, fingerprinting is at best a nuisance, a nuisance which will simple be circumvented by the community that desires file trading without such restrictions.
No maker of P2P networks wants this file trading to stop.
While I am against violating other owners copyrights, it seems odd to claim that other companies are in some way responsible for enforcing them for you.
Honestly folks, how many of us have written a program that we are entirely satisfied with? That wouldn't benefit from a careful rewrite from first principles?
In the real world, it is true that we must balance what is gained with potential losses. The addition of new features and the removal of new bugs is often costly. Depending on what the value to the users may be, this may make the rewrite an economically infeasible choice. But few programs are so simple and limited that they couldn't benefit from another try.
Any program worth writing is probably worth rewriting.
I hate to be unpopular, but the guy is dead, right? Does he really have the same rights to his name as somebody who is alive?
There is something called The Right of Publicity. In short, it is the right for a person to keep his identity from being exploited for commercial gain without his permission. This protection can last beyond death, but varies by state.
While the frequency is different, you'll find that these people sell patch antennas which compare favorably in signal strength with their parabolic antennas, but with a wider beam spread.
You can't have it both ways. If you want high gain, you have to have narrow beamwidths. If you want wide beamwidths, you can't have high gain. It's a conservation of energy thing.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
He can promise anything ten years down the line, he'll never be held responsible for it.
By refocussing NASA toward this ludicrous (and despite the peanut gallery's comments, at this point it is ludicrous) project to the exclusion of unmanned probes, he sets up NASA's eventual dismantlement for failing to deliver what even NASA must know they cannot deliver.
Wise up. This announcement has nothing to do with space exploration. It has to do with November, nothing more.
The problem with analog just isn't quality: analog channels take up much larger bandwidths than those high quality digital channels. There is a reason that your typical digital cable setup has many more channels than analog cable.
I mostly liked it. I felt that the pacing was a bit slow in spots. I mean let's face it, the entire earth is being bombarded with nukes, everyone you ever knew is being turned into ions, and for the most part people seem to be placidly going on about their way, and the cameras aren't really focused on any of _that_.
I mostly thought that the battle scenes were excellent though, but with one irritating fautlt. The "whip-left then zoom in camera" moves. I remember seeing this kind of camera move in Attack of the Clones, where they whip the camera and then zoom in on an assault craft, and in that context I thought the camera move was terrific. It lent a sort of "hand held camera, battlefield realistic" feel to the shot. It was kind of neat to see a
similar shot in Battlestar Galactica.
But it was relentless! Literally every sequence had a camera move that looked like this. It got to be ridiculous. Tone back the camera moves a bit, and when you do use camera moves like
that, it will have even greater impact.
As for the rest, liked Adama, liked Starbuck, liked the President, not fond of Baltar and his subplot, the cloud-which-kills-Cylons was stupid,
the idea of Cylon infiltrators is interesting but
could go horribly awry later.
Overall, at least it was better than Encounter at Farpoint or The Naked Now.
In the Bell Labs UTS Ninth Edition (V9 Unix) released in 1986, the crypt command was moved to manual section 6, games, along with trek, bridge, boggle, etc. Crypt (the lib in section 3) still existed, however.
That's because the two items (crypt(1) and crypt(3)) utilize entirely different algorithms.
The crypt(3) library is of course your everyday average DES, which as this thread notes, has gotten a bit long in the tooth. The crypt(1)
command however was an entirely different algorithm based upon the idea of a rotor machine.
It only has a single rotor however, which makes
cracking it pretty darned easy, probably _way_ simpler than the original German 3 rotor enigma
machine. The implementation that is still distributed in FreeBSD (/usr/src/usr.bin/enigma) is from the Crypt Breaker's Workbench, a near automated cracking utility for this code.
Cracking ordinary DES isn't a game quite yet, but
it's certainly not the best choice for a password
scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually isn't all that hard to teach yourself to flip a coin, catch it after the right number of turns, slap it onto your wrist and make it come out however you like. I achieved about 80% success when I practiced this. I'm not exactly the most adept at leger-de-main: I have little doubt somebody could get to the high 90% with practice.
You could probably even get good enough to allow somebody to call it in the air.
Recently, I completed reading Blondie24 -- Playing at the Edge of AI, an interesting book by David Fogel on his attempt to use evolutionary computation to evolve a high quality checker playing program. He tested his program by playing online against other checker players on The Zone, an online gaming network.
Early on, he discovered that his rather pedestrian nickname attracted few opponents, so he changed his online nick to be Obi_WanTheJedi, which seemed to attract a great deal more competition. As his program was revised and became stronger, he noticed that opponents would often become rude and angry as they fell behind, and would stall hoping he would drop out, or just disconnect, often after swearing like a sailor. Such drop outs made evaluating the games more difficult, so they tried a different strategy. This seemed worst among intermediate players: the better players were often much better sports.
They developed a cover story for Blondie24, a 24 year old female mathematics major. She was also single, attractive, and looking for a boyfriend.
They reported that they were on the receiving end of crude remarks and suggestions in about 1 in 3 games. Interestingly enough, the better players were reported to be uniformly polite, complimenting "her" on her excellent play at so young an age.
It seems rather obvious to me that women and men should be competing in the same competitions in this arena. The mere fact that fewer women play should not be a deterrent, nor do I think the prospect of easier money for women competitors merely by virtue of their being fewer female competitors is a good precedent to set. But perhaps all players should review their own behavior, and try to maintain a degree of fun and sportsmanship.
Perhaps you'd like to point out just where this functioning anti-missile technology has been deployed? You think that after twenty years of development and billions of dollars, you would have
something to show for it, wouldn't you?
I implemented an Enigma-cracking program when I was trying to crack the codes in Simon Singh's Cipher Challenge presented in The Code Book. It was a great deal of fun, and required just the right mix of learning, hacking and debugging to accomplish. Eventually I cracked 7 out of 10 of the ciphers (all the ones I expected to be within reasonable grasp).
The first difficulty was finding a sufficiently detailed description of the Enigma machine itself, so that I could write a simulator. Eventually I found a fairly good description of the machine, and some cleartext/ciphertext pairs to try it against. Initially there was a minor problem, which I eventually submitted as a plea to a newsgroup and received a quick response from an eGroup member as to the bug. Voila! A working simulator.
I took advice from Jim Gillogly and his cipher text only break of the Enigma machine. I suspected the final text would be German, so I built a table of trigraph frequencies from Goethe's Faust, which I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I then coded up a simple hill climbing algorithm which proceeded by Scanning all possible rotor orders (six of them) and all possible rotor positions (26^3), looking for the text with the trigraph score, and then refining that by hillclimbing by redoing the plugboard.
It worked the very first time: out popped the flawless decrypt in less than three minutes on my old 133Mhz P5.
Singh's challenge was signficantly aided by the fact that his ciphertext was quite a bit longer than the recommended message length that was actually used in the War. My experience in trying to crack shorter messages was that the statistics used to guide the search were often unreliable, and the likelihood of getting a successful automatic decrypt were quite a bit lower.
People scoffed at them because they were stupid. The idea of a comprehensive anti-ballistic missile system was stupid, and continues to be stupid. SDI was conceived for one purpose and one purpose only: as a boondoggle for defense contractors.
This gets Insightful?
Just who is going to be out there attacking us from space? Just how do you expect that these hypothetical attackers can test their space systems without being observed by any of our intelligence satellites? Who has the money and the motivation to launch such a massive undertaking?
Due to the economics, the U.S. has a great deal more to fear in the way of small, disgruntled terrorists who may construct biological, chemical or radioactive bombs. All the space based defenses in the universe won't keep you safe from those people.
The weaponisation of space is a very poor idea. The so called Outer Space treaty signed by the United States bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. This agreement was signed by the U.S., the U.S.S.R, and China, along with many other nations. While weapons of a more limited scope are not directly prohibited by this treaty, developing a significant capability to deliever weapons systems of a more conventional nature into space will undoubtably be viewed rather dimly by other nations, since it is clear that such technology and capacity could be quickly retargeted towards other uses.
Recent administrations have viewed these and other non-proliferation treaties as insignificant and not binding. It's a tragic failure of our foreign policy, and enormously short sighted.
Here's an idea: get over it. It isn't that big of deal, and either choice is vastly more readable than perl.
Let the flames begin!
SDI didn't work in the eighties, or the nineties, nor the oughts. It's a silly pipe dream designed to fill the pockets of defense contractors. It's like saying we can make an effective defense against gun crimes by making machines which shoot bullets aimed your way out of the air. It's vastly cheaper for them to make bullets than it is for you to build something that can shoot bullets, and it always will be.
Fertilizer. Nothing but fertilizer.
The author's point seems to be that because Open Source software allows anyone to contribute code, that the chance for an "agent provocateur" to insert malicious code into a project is large, and that the use of such code by governments could result in significant security risks.
Let's forget for a moment that the author doesn't actually cite even a single instance of this actually occurring.
The real question is: is this any less likely in systems which are developed in the closed source/commercial world? Does the author believe that potential info-terrorists can't work to place themselves into companies where they might be able to achieve similar ends? It might be more difficult, but once achieved the chance of detection would seem to be significantly lower, since only a very select few get to view the source code in question, and they aren't necessarily motivated by security concerns (they are concerned with pushing their software out the door for sale).
Ask yourself this question: are companies like Microsoft more responsive to security bug alerts, or is Linux?
The author also writes:
Again, a similar question should be asked: isn't this a similar problem for closed source/commercial development, where it might be in the best interest of the company to either ignore or cover up significant security breaches, and where the cause of such breaches are hidden from the eyes of those qualified to perform security audits?The author asks the question "Who is watching the watchers?". The answer is simple: everyone is. Or at least everyone can, which is perhaps the best that can be done.
Is there ever an argument against evolution that can withstand even the most cursory critical analysis? This one certainly doesn't.
Your "calculation" is a prime example of the GIGO principle. It utterly fails to capture any of the significant features of evolution. The first thing to realize is that individuals do not evolve: populations do. Without any mention of populations, your calculation is meaningless. Secondly, your calculation assumes that each of these mutations occur independently and simulateously. Mutations can be rare, but they are often passed to the descendants with a very high probability. This is also not reflected in your mathematics.
Evolution may not be truth, but it is fact. Only perverse individuals would claim otherwise.
Or, perhaps not.
Computer science and programming aren't the same thing. Computer science is knowledge. Programming is a skill. They reinforce each other, but it is a mistake to confuse them as being the same thing.
Higher level languages hide irrelevant details from us. They are a good thing: they allow us to concentrate on the task that we are trying to achieve. What parts of a machine are irrelevant? Most of them.
Don't believe me? Consider how many lines of code are in the Linux kernel, and compare the differences between say a PPC port of Linux and the X86 differences. Not very many differences compared to the raw number of lines, is it? That's because most of the machine differences are irrelevant.
Sure, you could clutter your mind with instruction timings, rules for cache invalidation or pipeline stalls. But it's almost certainly a waste of time, and it will get you no closer to understanding Computer Science.
Don't you think it is a bit silly to presume that you know better than the author of a work what is in his best interest or the best interest of users of his code? Your argument is an incredibly self serving one: you obviously want more code for GNU related projects. It is entirely possible for rational people to choose alternative open source licenses that do not coincide with that goal.
Get over it. Yes, SCO is a company that appears to be litigating themselves into profitability, at least until they can manage a stock dump. Yes, they are lobbying Congress with lies about the GPL and the open source movement.
But this doesn't justify a lynch mob. What you are doing is illegal.
If that doesn't convince you, think of the millions of people whose days are inconvenienceda and/or wrecked. Don't you think that their misery far exceeds any temporary hurt you could deal to SCO? It's not like they need to have a whole lot of internet connectivity to litigate their cases. If anything, being DOS'ed helps them make their point.
Think of the big picture. Act responsibly.
One very simple reason. Jackson doesn't have the rights to make the Hobbit (at least yet).
Of course they could do that.
There is only two minor problems.
While I am against violating other owners copyrights, it seems odd to claim that other companies are in some way responsible for enforcing them for you.
Honestly folks, how many of us have written a program that we are entirely satisfied with? That wouldn't benefit from a careful rewrite from first principles?
In the real world, it is true that we must balance what is gained with potential losses. The addition of new features and the removal of new bugs is often costly. Depending on what the value to the users may be, this may make the rewrite an economically infeasible choice. But few programs are so simple and limited that they couldn't benefit from another try.
Any program worth writing is probably worth rewriting.
There is something called The Right of Publicity. In short, it is the right for a person to keep his identity from being exploited for commercial gain without his permission. This protection can last beyond death, but varies by state.
You can't have it both ways. If you want high gain, you have to have narrow beamwidths. If you want wide beamwidths, you can't have high gain. It's a conservation of energy thing.
Consider this:
Wise up. This announcement has nothing to do with space exploration. It has to do with November, nothing more.
The problem with analog just isn't quality: analog channels take up much larger bandwidths than those high quality digital channels. There is a reason that your typical digital cable setup has many more channels than analog cable.
It usually involves me yelling at the top of my voice. I envy those who have a house so large that my voice does not provide adequate coverage.
I mostly liked it. I felt that the pacing was a bit slow in spots. I mean let's face it, the entire earth is being bombarded with nukes, everyone you ever knew is being turned into ions, and for the most part people seem to be placidly going on about their way, and the cameras aren't really focused on any of _that_.
I mostly thought that the battle scenes were excellent though, but with one irritating fautlt. The "whip-left then zoom in camera" moves. I remember seeing this kind of camera move in Attack of the Clones, where they whip the camera and then zoom in on an assault craft, and in that context I thought the camera move was terrific. It lent a sort of "hand held camera, battlefield realistic" feel to the shot. It was kind of neat to see a similar shot in Battlestar Galactica.
But it was relentless! Literally every sequence had a camera move that looked like this. It got to be ridiculous. Tone back the camera moves a bit, and when you do use camera moves like that, it will have even greater impact.
As for the rest, liked Adama, liked Starbuck, liked the President, not fond of Baltar and his subplot, the cloud-which-kills-Cylons was stupid, the idea of Cylon infiltrators is interesting but could go horribly awry later.
Overall, at least it was better than Encounter at Farpoint or The Naked Now.
You missed the fact that secret keys aren't uniformly distributed. In fact, it is certain that they are very sparsely distributed.
That's because the two items (crypt(1) and crypt(3)) utilize entirely different algorithms. The crypt(3) library is of course your everyday average DES, which as this thread notes, has gotten a bit long in the tooth. The crypt(1) command however was an entirely different algorithm based upon the idea of a rotor machine. It only has a single rotor however, which makes cracking it pretty darned easy, probably _way_ simpler than the original German 3 rotor enigma machine. The implementation that is still distributed in FreeBSD (/usr/src/usr.bin/enigma) is from the Crypt Breaker's Workbench, a near automated cracking utility for this code.
Cracking ordinary DES isn't a game quite yet, but it's certainly not the best choice for a password scheme.